


Born Again

by wynnebat



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Attempted Murder, Crack, Dark Harry Potter, Fluff, Gratuitously Hot Voldemort, Hogwarts Fourth Year, M/M, POV Harry Potter, total fluff after the attempted murder bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 21:59:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17030760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat
Summary: The ritual in Little Hangleton leaves both Harry and Voldemort much younger than they truly are. It’s not convenient for either of them, but they make do with a bit of kidnapping.





	Born Again

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by buckbuckbuck.

" _Avada Kedavra_ ," the hooded man says, and with a flash of light, Cedric is dead.

For several moments, Harry is paralyzed. He can only look down at his sort of rival, sort of friend, who'd been alive only moments before. He holds his wand tightly, his fingers clenched around the wood. Cedric had been the one to prompt him to bring his wand out. Harry doesn't even hear the hooded man's next words. He feels a burst of spell-light hit him and then he really is paralyzed and levitating through the air toward the hooded man. As he gets closer, Harry can see that the man is none other than Wormtail.

Which means Voldemort cannot be far. He may even be that strange bundle in Wormtail's arms, the one that shouted the order to kill Cedric in a strange, high-pitched tone. Harry tries to move, but all he can do is twitch his fingers, blink his eyes, and watch as Wormtail digs up a grave and says something about bone of the father. Harry can't look as Wormtail pierces his own skin and cries out about the blood of the servant. His levitation charm nearly fails, causing Harry to waver in the sky, but he stays up and motionless as Wormtail's blood drips into the cauldron.

"Flesh of the enemy," Wormtail says, looking up at Harry. Harry's eyes are wide as he realizes what's going to happen. He tries to do something, anything, but all he can do is soundlessly plead with his eyes for Wormtail's mercy. Wormtail has very little, yet he says, "I'm sorry, Harry."

"Hurry," says the golem that stands at the base of the cauldron, small and ugly. "Do it now, Wormtail."

Wormtail's apologies don't stop him from dropping Harry into the water. Everything goes hazy from there. It doesn't feel as though he's drowning. It doesn't feel as though there's any water here at all, in fact. Harry breathes in warm air and thinks that if this is death, he won't fear it. He still can't move, but his limbs are tingling, and the ritual must be happening. Voldemort must hate this, he faintly thinks. Harry's last moments aren't full of suffering at all. Instead, Harry feels a strange sort of peace. The potion is disturbed as something else is lowered inside. Through half-lidded eyes, Harry sees a short, stubby golem enter the cauldron, its dark gaze falling on Harry. Light fills the cauldron, connecting Harry's scar and the golem's changing body, and Harry thinks it's odd that such a brilliant light could exist within a dark ritual. The golem's mouth opens. Its teeth are sharp. It seems to be speaking, but Harry can't make out the words. The potion thickens around them like fog, like smoke, and Harry feels himself drift.

He's only jarred from this strange state of being when two giant hands grip him tightly by the chest and lift him from the cauldron. Confused and dazed, Harry thinks it's Hagrid who's lifting him, because Hagrid is the only person whose hands can be that big. Then he realizes it isn't a giant holding him; it's that Harry himself has shrunk. It's hard to move his head, but when he looks down, he has the body of a baby. The naked body of a baby, which should be his last concern when dealing with his enemy, but still. When Harry finally faces Voldemort's new body, he makes a tiny, strangled sound as he takes in his image. He doesn't know what he'd expected. Someone like the monster on the back of Quirrell's head or a horrifying, deformed figure. Maybe the golem, but full-sized. Instead, this version of his enemy looks as he did in the Chamber of Secrets. No longer is Tom a misty, washed-out version of himself. All the colors have been filled in, and he holds Harry with strong hands.

His eyes are red and horrible as he looks down at Harry. For a moment, Harry thinks he will throw him into the cauldron again, this time with a killing curse to follow up, but instead Voldemort says, "Well, Harry. It seems you're more interesting than I could have ever known. Can you understand me?"

"Yes," Harry means to say, but it comes out as a babble.

Voldemort is unimpressed. "Blink once for no and twice for yes."

Harry blinks twice. For good measure, he blinks again with a glare that he hopes no proper baby is capable of making. Merlin, what does Voldemort know about babies? What does Harry? He tries to do something, to hit Voldemort with his tiny little arms, but it goes about as well as one would expect. Voldemort only smirks at him and calls out, "Wormtail."

"Yes, my lord."

"Take him to Riddle Manor. He will be our new... guest."

"Er, yes, my lord," Wormtail splutters. As Harry is exchanged between their arms, he offers, "Would you like me to deal with him?" There can be no mistaking of what Wormtail is offering.

" _Crucio_ ," is Voldemort's reply.

Harry feels like one of Aunt Petunia's fancy holiday dishes, caught between Dudley and Aunt Marge's favorite pitbull. He's not sturdy enough to survive a fall to the ground, but when Wormtail drops him, Voldemort levitates him into the air. Harry's getting rather sick of being levitated. Wormtail twitches from the Cruciatus, his limbs sprawled out and his face in the graveyard dirt. Harry doesn't feel much sympathy. He's a baby; his emotions are still kicking in. And Wormtail did try to drown him. Voldemort performs the spell again, as though making sure Wormtail learns his lesson.

"You will care for him as though he were the most precious object you have ever borrowed from your lord," Voldemort tells him. Once Wormtail manages a weak agreement from the ground, Harry finds himself in Voldemort's arms again, facing his red eyes. "Lord Voldemort is very gracious. You will be pardoned for your past crimes and those of your parents. Should you fail me, I will never kill you, but you will wish I had. You will live for a very long time, rest assured." His eyes flash, and he traces a finger over Harry's scar. "What a lucky child you are."

Harry doesn't feel lucky at all. He tries to tell Voldemort so, but again it is only baby-talk, his vocal chords not developed enough for him to manage proper speech. This time, when he is given into Wormtail's arms, his arms shake and he holds Harry almost too tightly. Wormtail apparates with him and Harry throws up all over his robes upon arrival. It's his proudest moment of the day.

That day ends early for Harry, his body still too young and too weak to stay up for very long. He doesn't know what happens in the following weeks and months until he's able to finally demand answers from Voldemort. But his body isn't equipped for worry, or for long periods of thinking. He chats with Nagini, who decides he is a tiny, deformed snake, and tries to make Wormtail's life miserable. Voldemort shares Riddle Manor, then moves all of them to a much grander location. His manner is always too smarmy for his own good. Harry resolves to kill him just for that, but he's too busy learning to walk again.

Time passes, as it tends to do.

Voldemort wins, as one tends to do when there is no Boy Who Lived to oppose him. Harry takes solace in the fact that Voldemort had to win in a gangly teenager's body, not having yet grown into his future looks. Time and power does a lot for him, Harry is sad to say, and Voldemort ends up unfortunately attractive while Harry hasn't even hit his second puberty yet. He didn't even finish it the first time around and he has to go through him again. The universe seriously has it out for him.

He doesn't have much contact with the outside world in the first two years of his new life. At first, he can't even get out of a regular cot, never mind pen a letter. Later, Voldemort actually does forbid him from having any contact with his friends, citing that he won't have Harry encourage them by allowing the light side to find out he's alive. Instead, Harry is stuck reading, learning to fly on a children's broom, and growing. Once Voldemort wins, he's able to contact Ron and Hermione for the first time in years. There are a lot of tears and confusion, and at the end of the day, Harry returns home and has a late dinner with Voldemort. It strikes him then that if Voldemort had a master plan to earn Harry's loyalty, not torturing him and giving him plenty of food and shelter was a good start.

Harry gets glasses when he's five, then gets a potion snuck into his food that heals his vision. He can't decide whether to yell at Voldemort or thank him, so he does both. At age six, he's the best man at Ron and Hermione's wedding. Most of the Weasley family is still alive to sit on the lawn and clap, even if they have to do it with marked arms. At age eight, Harry develops an interest in diplomacy and what the rest of the wizarding world thinks of Voldemort's regime. By age ten, it becomes a small spy network, whose information Harry often ends up sharing over breakfast with his housemate. It's unavoidable, especially when Voldemort tells him juicy information in return. At age eleven, Harry declines going to Hogwarts. He can't imagine spending time with children who look his age but are actually a decade younger than him. It's bad enough that he's closer in age to Ron and Hermione's kid than to his friends. At age fifteen, Harry extends his diplomacy to magical creatures, finding it easier to deal with cultures that don't have such a preconceived idea of him. The Boy Who Lived (with Voldemort). The light side may have either perished, kneeled, or fled the country, but even regular apolitical witches and wizards all seem to have something to say about his decisions.

By and large, Harry doesn't care. He would have left had he wanted to. Voldemort couldn't have stopped him once Harry learned the ins and outs of the manor. And once Harry truly realized why Voldemort had decided to keep him alive. It may have started out because Harry is his horcrux, but Harry thinks nowadays Voldemort wouldn't choose to kill him if the horcrux suddenly vanished. (Most of the time, anyway. Harry still enjoys riling him up.)

In the spirit of vexing him, Harry enters Voldemort's bedroom without a courtesy knock, finding Voldemort has already turned in. He's sitting up in bed, wearing a set of blue sleeping robes as he pets Nagini's scaly head. Only the top half of her rests on the bed, the bottom half wrapped around the bed, the tip of her tail gently twitching. She's making contented little hisses, which Harry instantly pouts at because she never makes those sounds for Harry. Unfortunately, her loyalty is iron-clad. She loves Voldemort best.

Harry doesn't mind; he feels the same way. He wouldn't even mind Voldemort trailing his fingers through Harry's hair, though there are many better things for them to do in bed.

"Out, the both of you," Voldemort tells them without looking up at Harry.

That won't do. Harry disobeys without a second thought, getting up onto the bed and reaching for Nagini, who bears his petting. "I'm bored. It's your own fault, you know." The words come out in parseltongue, but it doesn't matter. Nagini is always happy to be included in the conversation. He's sitting on his heels on Voldemort's left side, his knees nearly touching Voldemort's thighs, which are under several layers of fabric, including the bedcovers. Still, Harry can dream.

"By refusing to allow you to contact the Veela Nation? Harry, the last three diplomats to attempt visiting were delivered back as pate spread. Two of them were sent by Fudge, so it can't be that they don't approve of only dark rule. They hate all outsiders."

"I could get through to them," Harry says, yawning halfway through his sentence. It's very late. He'd only stopped at Voldemort's door because the light had been on and Harry could never resist an opportunity to see why Voldemort was up at this hour. He has actual arguments, research papers written by his assistant, and even a few graphs. He'll pull all of those out tomorrow while also considering ways around Voldemort's orders. A spontaneous trip to France might be the ticket. He wonders if Voldemort will believe that Harry has suddenly been stricken by a love of French culture and needs to visit Paris. "What are you two chatting about this late, anyway?"

"S-secrets," Nagini hisses, flicking her tongue out at Harry. "Love s-secrets."

Harry almost takes it to mean that Nagini loves secrets, which she does, but Voldemort's face is doing a thing. A deliberately blank, uncaring kind of thing, the kind of look that is often followed by Voldemort storming out of wherever he is because someone somehow managed to chip at his composure. The kind of expression that isn't even followed by rage or curses, which very few people manage to do. Harry drops his hand from Nagini's scales and pokes at Voldemort's leg. "What kind of love secrets?"

If Voldemort's gone and fallen in love before Harry's managed to seduce him, Harry might kill someone. He'll blame it on bad influences during his childhood.

Nagini hisses out something that sounds like laughter, for which she gets a glare courtesy of Voldemort. He looks divided for a moment, before he says, "There was a rumor at the ministry that you'd taken a lover."

He stops there, like an emotionally constipated jerk, and Harry feels an urge to let him believe it. _Yes,_ Harry intends to say, _we're very happy, in love, and planning a vacation to Paris. Paris is lovely this time of year and we have to go now. Because of love_. But when Harry meets Voldemort's red eyes, he can't bring himself to say it. It's not legilimency, not magic, just the plain fact that Harry cares too much for him. More than necessary, more than advised. No one should fall in love with a Dark Lord. They tend to break your heart, or so Harry's heard. He says, more gently than he intends, "Not that you'd care?"

"A Dark Lord has no need for love," Voldemort says. He looks like he might soon take the option to flee the room.

"That's not true," Harry replies, not without affection. Even if Voldemort won't have him as a lover, he knows Voldemort cares about him. There have been hiccups when Harry has disobeyed him (to which Voldemort reacts to with expected anger, but never pain) or when Harry has flirted with him (which Voldemort never seems to know what to do with). "You can just tell me if you don't find me attractive."

"You'd tell me I'm lying," Voldemort says. It's as good as a confession, but not as satisfying.

"Of course I would. Honest Potter, they call me."

Voldemort groans. It's not a sexy groan, but Harry loves it nearly as much.

Harry can't quite believe that Voldemort isn't attracted to him. Sure, he'd been a stringy bean growing up, and he's still not jaw-droppingly handsome or anything at seventeen, but he's seen the way Voldemort looks at him, like someone to be treasured. Harry's never known what to do with those looks of Voldemort's, and he thinks Voldemort hadn't, either. Especially when those looks turned indulgent, turned actually caring, when Harry grew up and they began dueling together and sharing meals. When this house and Harry's body stopped being a prison, and Harry could leave whenever he wanted, provided he took appropriate safety measures. Appropriate in Voldemort's opinion, insanely overprotective in Harry's, but they'd learned to deal with each other's differences.

"So what is it?" Harry asks for the first time, being open instead of placing his attraction behind a veil of flirting. "Have you really started caring about what everyone else will think? According to international papers, you either have a harem of princesses in here or a gory slave dungeon. Do you? You've got to tell me these things."

"Harry," Voldemort sighs, deeply, and says no more.

"You look too young to sigh that deeply," Harry tells him. Voldemort doesn't look a day over thirty and even that is generous. "I can see the Daily Prophet headlines already. 'Supreme Ruler Chooses Supreme Mate' Or better, yet, something of Rita's. I like the thought of 'Voldemort finally seduces child bride'. Very classy." Rita would get a kick out of it. She's doing well for herself in America, where Voldemort's influence hasn't broken through yet. Harry finds her articles much more entertaining than the last time around. Voldemort does not.

"Is it the fact that I was raised in your house? I'm not going to claim you raised me, the credit completely goes to your house elves." As though he is making a great allowance, Harry offers, "I wouldn't mind calling you daddy, though. If that's what's stopping you."

"Don't you _dare_."

"Then what's left? Common decency? Where did you get some of that?"

"I would hardly settle for something common," Voldemort assures him.

Harry can't help but grin at that. He's the only one who can tease Voldemort into banter. No one else will ever comment on Voldemort's occasional pun, but Harry revels in each one. There's a human being underneath all that prickliness, one that Harry is inescapably in love with. Harry doesn't know when he fell in love with Voldemort. Certainly the attraction has been here all along, since before his second life. He vaguely remembers thinking of Tom Riddle as attractive, then pushing those feelings down the moment he realized who Tom was. You couldn't push things down in dreams, though, and there had been a lot of those in both his lives.

Becoming a child again changed him more than Harry will often admit. There are the obvious changes, of course. He's taller now, his shoulders broader. It's the effect of having grown up with house elves who would look at him with disappointment if Harry didn't finish a meal. He'd compare it to his first life, but honestly, his memories of the Dursleys have faded a lot. He doesn't care enough about them to hate them anymore. On the flip side, he has trouble relating to his former love of his parents. He loves them, always will, but he doesn't idolize them, nor does he think of them very much. It feels almost like he'd sprung into existence in Voldemort's arms, not that he's ever seen Voldemort as a father figure. He loves his friends and the Weasley clan, but he'd worked hard to rekindle that love and remind himself of how much better life was with them around.

Harry lets Voldemort think on his words for a while, absently patting Nagini's head. She hasn't made any comments about their exchange, not even to tell them that emotions are gross and they should simply choose the most powerful mate. It would be an argument in Harry's favor; now that Dumbledore is gone, there is no one more powerful than Voldemort, and Harry is his equal. They're two sides of a coin, two men whose lives have intertwined thoroughly by the vagaries of magic and fate. There isn't anywhere to go but forward. Harry just has to convince Voldemort of that.

"You're not wrong," Voldemort finally says. Pigs would fly before he tells Harry he's right without a negative to loosen the effect on Voldemort's pride. "When I took you in—"

"—when you turned me into a baby and kidnapped me for a few years—"

A raised eyebrow. "Only a few years? It seems longer than that."

"After the first few, I just decided to stay," Harry replies. "It's not kidnapping if I could've run away if I wanted to."

Voldemort seems to want to deny that, but for once he returns to the topic of love, a strange expression on his face. "You were small and breakable and it would have been so easy to break you. I developed caution and an imitation of kindness out of self-preservation, and then it only got worse." Voldemort pauses, and Harry wants to feel offended, but he just feels kind of smug. "I already feel all too many emotions regarding you. I haven't been able to get rid of them. They crept in like the devil's snare and all I know is that going any further will make me vulnerable to more."

Merlin, Harry's in love with a semi-recovering sociopath. Good to know. But if he discards everything else, he can see just how vulnerable Voldemort is to Harry, and if that isn't the best thing, Harry doesn't know what is. "So instead, you'd prefer I go off to Paris with my rumored lover?"

Voldemort opens his mouth to tell him what he thinks of that, then pauses, a glint of anger in his eyes. He grabs the front of Harry's robes, pulling him in close enough for Harry to see all the flecks of red in his eyes. "You're planning to contact the Veela Nation after I expressly forbid you from doing so."

Harry huffs. "What, nothing about my mysterious rumored lover?"

"You don't have one."

"I could." Frankly, Harry is a fucking catch. He could have all the lovers he wanted if he weren't mooning over Voldemort. He could have his own harem of princesses, take that.

"You don't." His tone is final, like shutting a door, like the last signature drying on an agreement. He tugs Harry even closer and Harry goes faster than Voldemort pulls him in, instantly placing his hands on Voldemort's shoulders and kissing him before Voldemort can change his mind. And he doesn't change his mind, not in the first seconds of the kiss, not in the minutes in which Harry loses track of time. They're probably crushing Nagini, but since she hasn't bitten them yet. Harry would probably notice.

As Harry pulls away to catch his breath, he asks, "Are you going to tell me all about your emotions?"

"Maybe in a century," Voldemort replies, kissing him again.

There's a grin on Harry's lips. He doesn't mind waiting a century, but he's certain that he can get those emotions out of Voldemort even sooner. In the war for Voldemort's heart, Harry won't settle for losing a single battle.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'm also on [tumblr](https://crownwithoutstones.tumblr.com/).


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